Motivational Quotes

Criticism

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

- Nunn, Gregory

Best Quotes about Criticism

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

10.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

11.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

12.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

13.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

14.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

15.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

16.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

17.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

18.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

19.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

20.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

21.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

22.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

23.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

25.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

26.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

27.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

28.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

29.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

30.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

31.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

32.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

33.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

34.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

36.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

37.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

38.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

39.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

40.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

41.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

42.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

44.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

45.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

46.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

48.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

49.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

50.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe